


My Dearest Friend

by Blackthorn1972



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: ACD Canon References, British English, Erotic Poetry, JohnlockChallenges Exchange, M/M, Romance, Tumblr: johnlockchallenges, Victorian Sherlock Holmes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 14:26:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1747844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackthorn1972/pseuds/Blackthorn1972
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A longish and rather delicious poem declaring the reasons for ACD canon John Watson's love, respect, admiration, and adoration for his inimitable companion at Baker Street.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Dearest Friend

Preface

I don't usually write Johnlock, but for this poem I will make a glorious exception, for I am in a very romantic mood indeed. However, writing Johnlock in canon is a sad business. In the timeline of ACD the only timeframe available for them to really explore a relationship was during the 8-year period between 1894 and 1902, right after the "Great Hiatus" after Reichenbach and before Watson's 1902 marriage.

In my interpretation of the canon and its subtext, the emotional territory during those 8 years would have been ripe for the unspoken to assert itself into reality, if only because Mary Morstan's health declined steadily until her death in early 1894, leaving Watson deadened to the constant heartache of this on top of losing his closest friend. It's no coincidence that Sherlock reappears in April of 1894. Watson's frankly overzealous philandering between their meeting in 1881 and the Reichenbach in 1891 would have driven someone as devoted as Sherlock round the bend, especially since he was excessively attached to Watson to the exclusion of all others. It's no surprise that there would have been an element of punishment in disappearing, not only to work, but to relieve his emotional distress and, passive-aggressively, instigate the same painful, long-suffering grief on John Watson. In canon this is supported by Sherlock's note that John Watson's only unforgivable sin against him was marriage.

During the Great Hiatus this, of course, would eventually peter out as a motivator, leaving only emptiness and sadness. Receiving word of Mary's death would provide the incentive to return to London with the hope of re-establishing something genuine in the working relationship, with a Watson weary of heartache, and ready for something truly permanent. Which, of course, a singularly devoted, fiercely monogamous, (formerly) passive-aggressive egomaniac like Sherlock had truly wanted to provide.

However, the social mores of Victorian society would have eventually caught up with them. Men like Watson were expected to marry, or else feel a pressure to do so, and attitudes were such that Watson would have felt compelled to fit the norm. This habit grated Sherlock constantly, but there was little he could do about it. Holmes was fearless and self-confident enough to be satisfied with a partner for life, beyond a doubt. But his own high standard, and the extremely repressed society of the time, clashed in such a way as to force him to cast his emotional hook in celibate desperation, and seek any kind of bonding regardless of physical fulfillment. This of course resulted in both celibacy and heartache, alleviated only by hard devotion to work, and his drug use.

John Watson was certainly not Sherlock's ideal partner. But Holmes was singularly devoted, even paying the price of loneliness as a result. 

It is romantic of me to believe that the character of Sherlock had only one true love of his life, that being John Watson. I like to live in that possibility. But Watson, regardless of his passionate declarations of love and admiration, would always end up compelled to follow society's norms, and would always end up breaking Holmes' heart by 1902. This would compel Holmes to dispose of London altogether at the relatively young age of 42, in 1905, to take up beekeeping in a cottage in Sussex, and have nobody else in his life besides Mrs. Hudson's constant presence, with little left but his countryside, his bees, and dreams of their victories and adventures in Watson's previous company.

So, although I write this poem in Watson's voice, I can say that it is Sherlock's heart that burns far brighter with fearlessness, loyalty, and devotion, but his emotions are too profound for the wordy poetry of Watson's narrative, and the eventual tragedy of being who and what he was in Victorian England, left unfulfilled thanks to social norms making his own feelings and urges completely invalid, associated only with shame and heartbreak.

It's no wonder that Johnlock (on the mentally healthy side of the new series fandom community) has them growing old together and living happily ever after. In ACD's world there was no such thing.

\---------

My own Illustration here: http://arc-traditionalmedia.deviantart.com/art/illustrationAO3-459823388

My Dearest Friend 

Oh, my dearest. You are a machine of cold deduction, and analysis.  
But your flushed exultation in my flattery  
heats you noticeably, my sharp-faced foxhound.  
I see you through my head,  
which I cannot explain. For I will look away,  
and still know you gaze upon me too long.  
It is not for nothing that I devote my whole world to you.

The thrill of those mindful hours  
chasing and defeating  
the twisted creatures of human iniquity,  
are a greater drug for me  
than the heartache upon your shelf  
coursing through your bored arms  
on the blackest of days.

I confess…to stop this nonsense,  
I deliberately try to break your boredom  
with rows and questions,  
for though I lay myself out to your mind’s whiplash,  
I live happily through the days  
of your disputatious harping  
upon my humble reckonings.  
They distract you from the syringe box.

My scribblings are lacking to you  
in subtleties of precision,  
and I am sorry for that, mostly.  
They reveal too well the reason  
for your embarrassed chagrin.  
My love for your work is too visible  
not to rebuke on principle,  
so I accept your chiding in silence.

I tolerate easily the silly rain of thrown papers,  
the leaden days you gaze upon the wall  
in black contemplation that I desperately desire to comfort,  
and cannot.  
I ache for the telegrams, and hunger for knocks at the door,  
just as you do, stagnation appeased.  
Those hours after we lay our hands  
upon murderers and jewels,  
or when a vindicated lady  
lays her thankful head upon your breast,  
the quivering and happy silence of victory  
lies upon us in the hansom going home.

My happy heart is your conductor of light.  
You are the source I define and direct with all duty,  
the cup of my satisfaction  
filled to the last with your approval.

Your nose is attuned, my dearest friend,  
to tiny unknown things  
and the movement of invisible powers,  
your intuition as fine as a mouse’s whisker.

You know what I really say  
when I say that you astound me.

Your constant, vigilant consciousness  
sharpens that predatory eye.  
Your frightening smile tells me everything.  
The hairs arise upon my neck  
flushing my ears and chest, as  
you transfigure into  
the dark angel of my heart.

When the tale is over,  
and the cover of the Strand shuts  
and slots back into thousands of bookshelves,  
we are alone together again.

I know that you can smell  
every exquisite desire I possess.  
I, a homely flat-faced ginger gentleman,  
ruddy and thick-middled,  
bountiful and bewhiskered,  
ache to feel your lithe satin skin  
upon the back of my hand.  
But in the hansom we only afford a gaze,  
and I am always the first  
to look away in shameful joy  
at the tumultuous gift you have given me.

The cabbie stops, and he gets his two shillings.  
We enter the door, smiling,  
and quietly retire to the parlour  
for me to pretend to read,  
and you to pretend to play, sprightly,  
sneaking looks, talking shop  
until ten. The door across the hall  
shuts, locks, and the rustling of old women  
goes silent, the maid gone  
till firelighting hour.

You are long gazing into the dying coal embers, smiling,  
your churchwarden chuffing away,  
your beautiful music maker  
laid gently by the chemistry table,  
a being of perfect peace in this holy hour.

I am always the first to make my excuses,  
pretend to yawn,  
fold the paper under my arm  
to take upstairs to my room,  
my great and stupendous bed  
left behind by the old married tenants  
well trodden in the centre even further.  
And invariably, as I make my rituals,  
I hear the door below me, and you making yours.

Out go our lights.  
Outside is the dimmed, smoke-softened city starlight  
and gaslights through curtain lace.  
I can hear the blood rushing in my ears,  
my hackles rise as I retire.

Sometime in the breathing silence,  
something clinks quietly downstairs,  
a passing nightdress button  
upon the brandy decanter.

The creature hunts me like his subjects.

Midnight bells upon the mantelpiece  
chime, and summon a silent devil to my door,  
creaking up my steps no louder than a spider  
between tolls of apprehension.

I face the wall under the duvet,  
every whisker alive,  
every nerve thrumming and electric,  
and the great abyss of my door  
creaks quietly open in the darkness  
revealing the dark creeper.

Shuddering the final breath of fearful anticipation,  
meaning shock, but giggling instead like a buffoon,  
I turn upon you, and your bark of laughter,  
muffled quickly by your hand,  
surrenders to the gleeful, naughty chortle that vibrates your smile.

The dressing gown flies from your  
impossibly thin, serpentine being,  
a tall, balding, sinewy nighthawk  
of warm yellow gaslight and sagging starshine,  
eyes gleaming for me in the darkness,  
pouncing like a cat on a fly,  
not closing as your grinning kisses find my mouth.

Oh, the intrepid sneaking of old men making love!  
We are giggling like grammar school prats in a broom cupboard,  
paying for our grotesqueries and offenses to the palate  
of youthful, comely romance  
by sacrificing the scum of London to Scotland Yard!

I confess, and will confess again! I have not one regret.  
We pay our penance forward, do we not?

You have crept upon me at midnight  
twice a hundred times  
in these days and years after your return,  
your confession and absolution  
welding together with a desperate embrace  
my heart, broken so deeply at the Reichenbach,  
left to suffer for so long.  
Yet you so tenderly changed your inner war,  
assembling my broken soul with every care,  
begging forgiveness for every accursed lie,  
piece by piece,  
with shining gold between the cracks.  
The lamas of Tibet transformed you somehow.  
Love has changed you,  
my dearest friend,  
my maddening treasure,  
my strange, miraculous and beloved monster.

Our flesh begins to age,  
and once-judging eyes  
come to ignore the theoretical fancies of lonely warriors.  
We have long vindicated our midnight vices  
by warring upon far, far uglier tragedies of humanity,  
with every fiber of your outrageously heroic moral rectitude  
inspiring me endlessly to follow you even to the gates of Hell.

This world with its horrors  
creates tragedy so much fiercer, and fouler,  
than the grey and lopsided joys of old men in love.

You pounce yet again like a mad thing,  
and each time, lightning strikes my flesh  
where your hands fall, collapsing in laughter.  
I rise like thunder when our lips clash,  
like ships at war,  
and joy knows no end, grasping one another  
in ecstatic candor,  
splitting one another down the middle,  
kissing you for aeons,  
until we consume ourselves in heaving thrusts of fire,  
blaspheming the sinner's entrance with angelic love,  
shuddering death while gasping for life.

You become a being of light while over me,  
your face joining the great host  
in wordless transformation, singing my name,  
and I a beast of fire over you,  
your lithe, soft-skinned, graceful and dark body,  
making my eyes a firebrand,  
possessing every low pleasure  
that sins against my power of self-control.  


You are my life.  
Beneath gears and clockwork,  
numbers and edges,  
theories and suppositions,  
I deduce that your heart is on fire  
to be reminded of this  
repeatedly.  
You are ever seeking to give me this adventure,  
ever searching for new paths  
to this very moment of glory and victory,  
lived again and again  
the midnight after  
every story has its end.

I am your lionheart, your conductor of light,  
and you, my shining mythical beast of boundless intellect,  
visiting a triumph of purity  
in moments as magical and perfect  
as the first.  
How lucky I was  
simply to find you  
in a universe of inadequate stars. 

These blessed nights,  
when our heads are so close upon the pillow,  
we dream together the same dream,  
flying out our great window in ghostly nightdress,  
above the chimney tops, hand in hand,  
and through translucent roofs,  
see more wondrous things  
than the mind of man  
could possibly imagine.

The busy street in early summer light  
streams upon us in the morning,  
the fire is quietly lit by the maid downstairs,  
and there are three long, glorious hours  
before my practice opens.  
Even more gloriously, you are still here,  
reading the paper,  
nesting your tumescent warmth  
upon the small of my back.  
I awaken, and shift, grinning like a boy.  
Down comes the paper,  
and without care, I turn to you.

In daylight you acknowledge me again,  
and your lips are gentle and slow.

My dearest friend,  
I am so very grateful  
for the strange and wondrous life  
you have given me.


End file.
